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Thursday, December 8, 2011

Do any of your characters have children? How well do you write them?

Oh snap, not many of my characters at all have children. Let me ponder this…
I’ll restrict it to main characters (parent side-characters don’t count) and that leaves me with, I believe, one character of mine who has canon children. Kieran from Raise Holy Hex is a child in the first story, in the second story she’s a teenager, and in her third and final story, she is a mother of three (one daughter and twin boys.)

Due to my extensive babysitting experience, I like to think I’m pretty good at depicting children in my stories, though these particular children haven’t been written yet. It’s not the children that make me nervous though- it’s the mother-child relationship that I’m hesitant to write.

Since I’m not a mother, the closest experience I have to mother-child relationship would be with my pets. (When I say mother-child relationship, I place the perspective character first. So a character with the perspective of a mother would make it mother-child, as opposed to my experience with my own mom, which is a child-mother relationship.) Children are not pets. And babysitting isn’t exactly a good basis for mother experience since being full-time responsible for children is, I imagine, so much more complex.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve only plotted the third story rather than sat down to write it. Kieran’s relationship with her children is very important to that story.